Wright Morris -- Author, Teacher

J.L. Pimsleur

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 1, 1998

1998-05-01 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISC -- Wright Morris, a prolific author considered by many critics to be one of America's finest yet most underrated novelists, died Saturday at a Mill Valley nursing home. He was 88.

Indeed, San Francisco State University English Professor Peter Weltner declared upon hearing of Mr. Morris' death that his vision, his clarity and his faithful adherence to the central themes of his work were "equalled in 20th century fiction only by Faulkner."

Mr. Morris taught creative writing at San Francisco State University from 1963 through 1974. Weltner, a longtime student and teacher of Mr. Morris' work, said he first came to San Francisco State to teach in 1969 partly because of Mr. Morris' presence there.

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A highly regarded photographer as well as author, Mr. Morris wrote 33 books during his long career, including five volumes of "photo-texts," 19 novels, four books of essays, two collections of short stories and three volumes of memoirs.

In 1981, he won an American Book Award for another novel, "Plains Song," and the next year he was honored with the Commonwealth Award for distinguished service in literature. In the mid- '80s he was one of the first recipients of the Whiting Writers Award, and he won three grants from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Yet for all the respect of his peers, he was relatively unknown to the public -- a condition explained, in part, by East Coast indifference to the matters, manners and morals of the Midwest.

Often compared to Willa Cather in his celebration of the prairie, the New York Times observed, Mr. Morris may have "suffered the snobbery of Easterners like H.L. Mencken, who said of Cather: 'I don't care how well she writes, I don't give a damn what happens in Nebraska.' "

That, of course, was long before pop novels like "The Bridges of Madison County" sentimentalized life and love in middle America.

Wright Morris was born Jan. 6, 1910, in Central City, Neb., where he would set many of his stories. His mother died when he was six days old and his father, a railroad man turned farmer, married a teenage dancer.

He traveled around the Midwest and eventually made his way to California, where he enrolled in Pomona College -- dropping out after three years to roam around Europe, where his literary sensibilities were cultivated and refined.

Later he was to teach contemporary literature at Pomona as well as Bennington College in Vermont.

Although Mr. Morris' writing and teaching was to take him far from the Great Plains, he used his native state as a setting for some of his most significant and enduring work, including "The Home Place," a photo-text published in 1948, which used 90 photographs he had taken at a family member's farm in rural Nebraska.

As a photographer, Mr. Morris drew inspiration from the documentary style of black-and-white photographer-realists such as his idol, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, while exploring persistent personal themes such as time and memory.

In addition to appearing in his photo-texts, Mr. Morris' photographs are in numerous museum collections around the country. Among the admirers of his somber pictures of a vanishing rural America was the author Thomas Mann, who praised "the harsh beauty of their ugliness, the romanticism of the commonplace, the poetry of the unpoetical."

In a moving tribute, Professor Weltner said upon learning of his mentor's death: "Wright Morris made his fiction, like his photographs, not out of reverence but out of awe. He gazed in wonder at life and created out of what he saw great art. He was a lyricist of the ordinary world and the strangeness of the every day: an old car, a screen door, a drawer full of worn eating utensils, crystals that made themselves. . . ."

In 1961, Mr. Morris married the former Josephine Kantor, an art collector and dealer. She is his sole survivor.